Arundhati’s public statement after attack on her home

SOMETHING FOR THE MEDIA TO THINK ABOUT

A mob of about a hundred people arrived at my house at 11 this morning (Sunday, October 31, 2010.) They broke through the gate and vandalized property. They shouted slogans against me for my views on Kashmir, and threatened to teach me a lesson. The OB Vans of NDTV, Times Now and News 24 were already in place ostensibly to cover the event live. TV reports say that the mob consisted largely of members of the BJP’s Mahila Morcha (Women’s wing). After they left, the police advised us to let them know if in future we saw any OB vans hanging around the neighborhood because they said that was an indication that a mob was on its way. In June this year, after a false report in the papers by Press Trust of India (PTI) two men on motorcycles tried to stone the windows of my home. They too were accompanied by TV cameramen.

What is the nature of the agreement between these sections of the media and mobs and criminals in search of spectacle? Does the media which positions itself at the “scene” in advance have a guarantee that the attacks and demonstrations will be non-violent? What happens if there is criminal trespass (as there was today) or even something worse? Does the media then become accessory to the crime? This question is important, given that some TV channels and newspapers are in the process of brazenly inciting mob anger against me. In the race for sensationalism the line between reporting news and manufacturing news is becoming blurred. So what if a few people have to be sacrificed at the altar of TRP ratings? The Government has indicated that it does not intend to go ahead with the charges of sedition against me and the other speakers at a recent seminar on Azadi for Kashmir. So the task of punishing me for my views seems to have been taken on by right wing storm troopers. The Bajrang Dal and the RSS have openly announced that they are going to “fix” me with all the means at their disposal including filing cases against me all over the country. The whole country has seen what they are capable of doing, the extent to which they are capable of going. So, while the Government is showing a degree of maturity, are sections of the media and the infrastructure of democracy being rented out to those who believe in mob justice? I can understand that the BJP’s Mahila Morcha is using me to distract attention the from the senior RSS activist Indresh Kumar who has recently been named in the CBI charge-sheet for the bomb blast in Ajmer Sharif in which several people were killed and many injured. But why are sections of the mainstream media doing the same? Is a writer with unpopular views more dangerous than a suspect in a bomb blast? Or is it a question of ideological alignment?

Arundhati Roy
October 31, 2010

Related Articles

• BJP women’s wing holds protest at Arundhati’s house (topinews.com)
• Case might be filed against Geelani, Arundhati Roy (ibnlive.in.com)

www.outlookindia.com | The Great Indian Love Affair With Censorship

Ashis Nandy, “The Great Indian Love Affair with Censorship“

“Patriotism,” Samuel Johnson said nearly 250 years ago, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” These days in India, the adage can be safely applied to nationalism. There is no other explanation of the threat to arrest and try Arundhati Roy on charges of sedition for what she said at a public meeting on Kashmir, where Syed Ali Geelani too spoke. I was not there at the meeting, but I have read her moving statement defending herself afterwards. I feel both proud and humbled by it. I am a psychologist and political analyst, handicapped by my vocation; I could not have put the case against censorship so starkly and elegantly. What she has said is simultaneously a plea for a more democratic India and a more humane future for Indians.

I faced a similar situation a couple of years ago, when I wrote a column in the Times of Indiaon the long-term cultural consequences of the anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002. It was a sharp attack on Gujarat’s changing middle-class culture. I was served summons for inciting communal hatred. I had to take anticipatory bail from the Supreme Court and get the police summons quashed. The case, however, goes on, even though the Supreme Court, while granting me anticipatory bail, said it found nothing objectionable in the article. The editor of the Ahmedabad edition of the Times of India was less fortunate. He was charged with sedition.

I shall be surprised if the charges of sedition against Arundhati are taken to their logical conclusion. Geelani is already facing more than a hundred cases of sedition, so one more probably won’t make a difference to him. Indeed, the government may fall back on time-tested traditions and negotiate with recalcitrant opponents through income-tax laws. People never fully trusted the income-tax officials; now they will distrust them the way they distrust the cbi.

In the meanwhile, we have made fools of ourselves in front of the whole world. All this because some protesters demonstrated at the meeting that Arundhati and Geelani addressed! Yet, I hear from those who were present at the meeting that Geelani did not once utter the word “secession”, and even went so far as to give a soft definition of azadi. By all accounts, he put forward a rather moderate agenda. Was it his way of sending a message to the government of India? How much of it was cold-blooded public relations, how much a clever play with political possibilities in Kashmir?

We shall never know, just because most of those who pass as politicians today and our knowledge-proof babus have proved themselves incapable of understanding the subtleties of public communication. They are not literate enough to know what role free speech and free press play in an open society, not only in keeping the society open but also in serious statecraft.

In the meanwhile, it has become dangerous to demand a more compassionate and humane society, for that has come to mean a serious criticism of contemporary India and those who run it. Such criticism is being redefined as anti-national and divisive. In the case of Arundhati, it is of course the BJP that is setting the pace of public debate and pleading for censorship. But I must hasten to add that the Congress looks unwilling to lose the race. It seems keen to prove that it is more nationalist than the BJP.

It is the hearts and minds of the new middle class—those who have come up in the last two decades from almost nowhere and are middle class by virtue of having money rather than middle-class values—that both parties are after. This new middle class wants to give meaning to their hollow life through a violent, nineteenth-century version of European-style ‘nationalism’. They want to prove—to others as well as to themselves—that they have a stake in the system, that they have arrived. They are afraid that the slightest erosion in the legitimacy of their particularly nasty version of nationalism will jeopardise their new-found social status and political clout. They are willing to fight to the last Indian for the glory of Mother India as long as they themselves are not conscripted to do so and they can see, safely and comfortably in their drawing rooms, Indian nationalism unfolding the way a violent Bombay film unfolds on their television screens.

Read the rest of this article at outlookindia.com

 

Related Articles

• Its Called Dissent, Not Sedition (teabreak.pk)
• Arundhati Roy Offends the Indian State — Again (blogs.wsj.com)
• In praise of Arundhati Roy (newstatesman.com)

Islamophobia and the two “great democracies”

Read this piece from Daily Kos: State of the Nation.

It won’t take you long. A few minutes to skim through, and a few more to read it more thoroughly. It’s a really frightening view of the emerging fascistic bigotry that is being spawned in the United States by right-wing bigots who want to whip people up into a frenzy against Muslims, mosques, Islamic community centers, the hijab, indeed Islam itself.

What’s scary too, from a desi perspective, is not just that this bigotry will directly impact all of us living abroad. Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, Christian, Buddhist, agnostic, atheist, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan–it doesn’t matter to these pigs, so long as you have brown skin and “look Muslim.”

There is good reason, then, for the sense of easy unity that exists among many expat desis. Unlike back home, here we find ourselves having to reach out to one another, at the gas station, the local desi grocery store, the deli…. When I stop by the gas station around the corner from my home, the Pakistani sardarji who pumps my gas, an elderly gentleman who seems to suffer from a hip problem that forces him to limp from car to car, greets me with a smile.

“Hello,” he says.

“Hello-ji”!

“Fill it up?”

“Haan ji. Thank you.”

“Garmi bahut hai aaj,” he says as he pumps the gas.

And thus begins our ritual 3-4 minute Hinglish conversation, which, remarkably enough, almost always moves within a couple of minutes from the vagaries of the weather to the stupidities of politicians in India and Pakistan.

“Pehle aapas mein koi farq nahin tha–yeh sab Britishers ka kaam hai.”

Sadly, though, such sentiments are sorely lacking in India these days. I can’t say much for the small towns or villages–I haven’t been back to Anantapur or Akkirampura, the places where I spent my summers months as a kid–in decades. But what I see of the urban, middle-class, “educated” folks, gives me little cause for hope or optimism. It has become rare indeed to find a secular, humanistic spirit amidst the starry-eyed shoppers of Gurgaon’s or Bangalore’s malls.

To even broach the question of Pakistan, or Kashmir, or Muslims with Hindus in India these days is to provoke a seemingly unwinnable argument. The anti-Muslim bigotries, lies, and distortions of history that have been peddled for decades now by well-funded (with NRIs contributing much of that funding) fascist organizations, the Sangh Parivar, the RSS, the VHP and Bajran Dal, etc, have become commonsense among the urbanites.

One’s hopes ought to be inspired and awakened by the youth in every epoch. Depressingly enough, it is among the urban, “educated” youth that political complacency and apathy, passivity and resignation, is most marked. Unschooled in anything but the skills needed to be a good worker in a globalized marketplace, unfamiliar with their own history, let alone that of other peoples or lands, and intoxicated with get-rich-quick schemes, EMI-driven consumerism, and a corporate-driven work ethic, their blind adherence to the prejudices of the society around them renders them incapable of inspiring anything but despair, if not disgust.

Pakistan is drowning from below, and being bombed from above, while its ostensible leader enjoys a junket in London, preening for the cameras and obsequiously reassuring David Cameron of his commitment to the “war on terror.” The courageous Kashmiris are left to the mercy of the gun-toting state-terrorists that are the “Security Forces” (whose security, one wonders) by a callous and unfeeling Indian populace. And in large parts of central India, thousands of adivasis are being mowed down in the name of “national security.”

And when voices like Arundhati Roy’s are raised against this madness, they are shouted down by loud-mouthed hate-mongers whose intolerance of others is only matched by their ignorance of themselves. It was in 2008 that Roy wrote about Kashmir that azadi is what they want, and that “denial is delusion.” Back then, she faced a barrage of attacks on OutlookIndia’s comments pages. But can anyone who reads that article today say that she was wrong in her prediction that this isn’t going away?

Here’s how she concluded that piece:

Of course there are many ways for the Indian State to continue to hold on to Kashmir. It could do what it does best. Wait. And hope the people’s energy will dissipate in the absence of a concrete plan. It could try and fracture the fragile coalition that is emerging. It could extinguish this non-violent uprising and reinvite armed militancy. It could increase the number of troops from half-a-million to a whole million. A few strategic massacres, a couple of targeted assassinations, some disappearances and a massive round of arrests should do the trick for a few more years.

The unimaginable sums of public money that are needed to keep the military occupation of Kashmir going is money that ought by right to be spent on schools and hospitals and food for an impoverished, malnourished population in India. What kind of government can possibly believe that it has the right to spend it on more weapons, more concertina wire and more prisons in Kashmir?

The Indian military occupation of Kashmir makes monsters of us all. It allows Hindu chauvinists to target and victimize Muslims in India by holding them hostage to the freedom struggle being waged by Muslims in Kashmir. It’s all being stirred into a poisonous brew and administered intravenously, straight into our bloodstream.

At the heart of it all is a moral question. Does any government have the right to take away people’s liberty with military force?

India needs azadi from Kashmir just as much—if not more—than Kashmir needs azadi from India.

When the Sri Lankan military virtually massacred the LTTE into oblivion, killing untold numbers of Tamil civilians in the process, and when they subsequently sequestered the still-living refugees in mass concentration camps, did the urbanite sophisticates of our “Great Democracy” march through the streets denouncing human rights abuses? Did they write editorials decrying the use of indiscriminate force to end an insurgency? When the Sri Lankan state murdered independent journalists, did those urban youth who grandstand about how democratic we are hold dharnas in the name of free speech or democracy? After all, no “national interest” was at stake here, so there was no need to pussyfoot around the question.

But why should they? For business as usual, stability is a must. So, following in the footsteps of the Rajapaksas and Fonsekas (themselves the eager pupils of Israeli counter-insurgency tactics), the Indian military apparatus and the paramilitary security forces are murdering and maiming thousands with impunity.

The moral turpitude, the utter degeneration of urban Indian political culture means that lives that are destroyed in the name of “stability” or “security” or “national unity” are expendable in the eyes of the public.

—

Fortunately, for expats in the U.S., there are many, many people who I am confident will be willing to come out and stand up against the kind of bigotry towards Muslims that the fascists are whipping up, although it must be said that progressive forces here are not at all well-organized. But the fascists can easily overplay their hand and face a tide of opposition, particularly from the youth, who are far less prone to prejudice and hate these days than either their elders in New York and Washington or their peers in Bangalore and Gurgaon.

Prejudice, desi style, and its context

Krish’s excellent post raises some very important questions that often get silenced in desi circles, regardless of the continent on which they occur. Why is Indian culture so incredibly intolerant these days? Anti-Muslim prejudice, casteist anti-dalit blindness, anti-Pakistani sentiment…. Racism and sexism run rampant in our society today (and Krish might have included homophobia and prejudice towards transgendered/transsexual community).

A small example of such intolerance can be seen in the knee-jerk objections that are raised against even a mere passing reference to Hindu fundamentalism in an excellent recent blog post on the Lal Masjid crisis.

Troublingly enough, many of these forms of intolerance that Krish outlines are weaving themselves into the fabric of Indian and Indian diasporic commonsense, particularly among the urban, educated upper-middle and lower-middle classes, but not excluding well-paid BPO and call-center workers who see…

Easy Come, Easy Go

How long will the Indian economic boom last? It is anybody’s guess at this point. From the standpoint of investment, profits and productivity, the Indian economy seems to be chugging along, undeterred by the mayhem in its neighboring states, and seemingly oblivious of the depths of discontent at home. That India has become the world’s Walmart of clerical service work is well enough known–the call centers, BPOs and other outsourcing-driven ventures have been hailed as bringing a new prosperity to Indian cities.

Educated professionals in their twenties and thirties have no doubt benefited tremendously from the outsourcing boom. As call-center and BPO workers’ wages have increased, their rising living standards have encouraged them to identify with the upper classes, with dreams of upward social mobility, on the one hand, and delusions of national(ist) grandeur on the other. The “I” figures rather prominently in these urban workers’ conception of “India, Inc.”

An increasingly commodified and consolidated media environment has further encouraged this process, depoliticising and “dumbing down” an already denuded social and cultural milieu. Indian news media, shamelessly and blindly pursuing the American Way, have adopted the same norms of sensationalist reporting that have been so effective in stifling creative and critical public discourse in the West.

Arundhati Roy hit the nail on the head in her speech at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, in 2003. The Indian media, she said, are increasingly moving towards a model of “crisis reportage”:

Crisis reportage in the twenty-first century has evolved into an independent discipline–almost a science. The money, the technology, and the orchestrated mass hysteria that goes into crisis reporting has a curious effect. It isolates the crisis, unmoors it from the particularities of the history, the geography, and the culture that produced it. Eventually it floats free like a hot-air balloon, carrying its cargo of international gadflies–specialists, analysts, foreign correspondents, and crisis photographers with their enormous telephoto lenses.

Somewhere mid-journey and without prior notice, the gadflies auto-eject and prachute down to the site of the next crisis, leaving the crestfallen, abandoned balloon drifting aimlessly in the sky, pathetically masquerading as a current event, hoping it will at least make history.

There are few things sadder than a consumed, spent crisis.

Such a media environment encourages people to ignore, rather than try to understand, the degradation of the world in which they live. And when the crises are occurring in far-off, unknown places, like Nandigram or Singur, or the slums and shantytowns of one’s own city, they are easily forgotten and dismissed as the necessary “price of progress.” Globalization is a benevolent force. War is peace.

To the extent that they are deemed to require an explanation at all.

Most often, however, the response of this layer of educated, urban workers is a shrugging of the shoulders. A perverse indifference to those who are worse off than themselves and a cavalier nonchalance are today markers of one’s trendiness. A social conscience is for losers, it seems. Try to engage these folks around the burning issues of the day, and you will be roundly rebuked for being “too deep” and “out of touch.”

And those who, like Arundhati Roy, try to shake up this complacent attitude are simply dismissed out of hand.

“Puhleez,” scoffed an old friend in Mumbai recently, “she is the most pretentious writer and person in India today.” This, from someone who considers herself a journalist, and according to whom even this blog is too “deep,” for journalism, she tells me, is “all about bullet points, not going into details.” Enough said.

This apolitical atmosphere among the urban youth and educated working-class professionals in their 20s and 30s, fueled by conditions of economic boom and nationalist hubris, will probably continue for a while to come.

But one element of this boom has always been much more fragile and tenuous than the talking heads would admit. This is the world of outsourcing, of call centers and BPOs, boosted thus far by low wages, a vast pool of skilled urban workers, and Western multinationals looking for greater rates of profit. There is still a good deal of steam left even in this sector of the economy, but it is showing signs of overheating. According to an article in The Australian, some American companies are beginning to close down their India operations and return to their own shores because of the rise in wages in cities like Bangalore. I’m not predicting imminent doom, but this does point to the fact that the outsourcing boom is built on uncertain foundations–it always was.

For the multinationals, this young, enthusiastic, and loyal workforce, which has adopted so much of the ideology of globalization, is quite expendable.

Easy come, easy go.